Winter 2014 : rate, validation and stability

Thanks to our volunteers of the summer, atlas at home is providing about 3% of the total ATLAS production jobs and it is a superb result for a project in its beta stage.

Time has come to increase the load by moving to new servers, reworking the job submission logic and trying several job length. Interested people can follow the various threads via the BOINC web page news and forums, others will simply see the result on the Jobs statistics dashboard.

Another priority is what we call validation : ATLAS cannot afford and does not want to waste computing resources. Therefore, at the beginning of every large scale campaign a set of specific and known tasks is sent on the GRID. The result is inspected by a team of physicists, both in terms of format (files produced have to be usable) and content (which has to be identical for all platforms and computing centers). A standard set of key variables is also checked to verify the physics properties of the events produced.

So, events produced by you, volunteers, will be compared and checked in great details by physicists... while computing experts watch the behavour of the servers.